Three Days of Happiness

145
how many times I’d passed them, and slight discoveries like that
made my heart dance.
Sometimes the same vending machine would show a very different
face at day and at night. While some vending machines glowed to
stand out and had bugs flocking to them, others saved electricity by
only lighting their buttons, so they floated in darkness.
I knew that even when it came to a hobby as dumb as this, there
were people far more serious about it than me, and I could never
compete with them.
But I wholeheartedly did not care. This was, as someone once said
it, the method most suited to me.
At the start of each day, I’d head for the photo studio and get
breakfast in the thirty minutes waiting for the film to develop. At
the end of each day, I’d lay the photos I developed that morning on
the table, look at them with Miyagi, and carefully put each one into
an album.
Though the common point between all the photos was the focus on
a vending machine, that made the differences of everything else
stand out.
Kind of like the same person taking photos with them in the middle,
always with the same pose and expression. Vending machines
served like a measurement tool.
The owner of the photo studio seemed interested in me and how I
came every morning just to develop photos of vending machines.
He was about forty, had many gray hairs, was unhealthily thin, and
very modest. One day he noticed me casually talking to empty